Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is capable of processing an entire trading day’s volume equal to more than 100 million trades per day in the US equity market, according to a study from several major companies.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) partnered with Accenture and blockchain specialists Digital Asset and R3 to build a prototype of a US equities clearing and settlement system, using DLT for the 19-week research project.
Accenture built a network of more than 170 nodes to model the financial ecosystem of exchanges, broker dealers and market participants to capture matched equities trades from exchange DLT nodes. The DTCC then acted as the central counterparty (CCP) maintaining anonymity on the ledger.
The project showed that DLT is capable of supporting average daily trading volumes at peak rates, totaling 115,000,000 trades daily, or 6,300 trades per second for five continuous hours.
“We are excited to lead this important work to advance the performance capabilities of DLT and help create new possibilities for leveraging the technology more broadly across financial markets,” said Murray Pozmanter, head of clearing agency services at DTCC.
“As an early adopter of DLT, we are encouraged by the results of the study because they prove that the technology’s performance can scale to meet the needs of markets of different sizes and maturity.”
DTCC emphasised that the study is a starting point for using DLT for settlement, and only basic functionality has been tested with additional work required to determine if the technology can be used to meet the resiliency, security, operational needs and regulatory requirements of its existing clearance and settlement system.
“This project answered key questions and built serious confidence in blockchain’s ability to drive large scale transformation,” said David Treat, global blockchain lead at Accenture. “The close collaboration with the DTCC and our alliance partners, Digital Asset and R3, enables us to push DLT performance to new levels against real world requirements and conditions.”